Utopia, you are standing in it!

It’s not often (actually, only once) that I share a video lasting nearly two hours. But this video – revolving around the intellectualrivalry between pro-market Hayek and pro-intervention Keynes – is an excellent summary of 20th-century economic policy.

We learn about the growth of socialism and communism during and after World War I.

This then led economists from the Austrian school – including Hayek – to explain why that approach (genuine socialism, meaning government ownership, central planning, and price controls) was doomed to failure.

But other forms of intervention and redistribution gained new adherents, especially when Keynes argued that the Great Depression was the fault of capitalism (for what it’s worth, I think the video fails to include analysis on how the New Deal actually lengthened and deepened the downturn).

Unfortunately, the Keynesian narrative dominated and the video informs us that the people of the…

A couple of years ago, to help build the case against socialism, I showed how West Germany enjoyed much faster growth and much more prosperity than East Germany.

The obvious lesson to be learned from this example of “anti-convergence” is that market-oriented economies out-perform state-controlled economies.

I want to revisit this topic because I recently dealt with someone who claimed that government spending via the Marshall Plan deserves the credit for West Germany’s post-war economic renaissance.

What does the evidence say? Was foreign aid from the United States after World War II a key driver (for Keynesian or socialist reasons) of the West German economy.

The answer is no.

Professor David Henderson explained the role of the Marshall Plan for Econlib.

After World War II the German economy lay in shambles. …less than ten years after the war people already were talking about the German economic miracle…

“Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton,” declared the new king to the House of Representatives upon his succession. George III was proud to announce he was the first British-born king since the reign of the Stuarts. He was also the first Hanoverian monarch to speak native English, in fact, George III never even visited Hanover during his lifetime. He viewed himself as a man of the people, a noble and virtuous patriot-king, an Englishman to the core, although his opponents rarely missed an opportunity to brand him an alienating tyrant hell-bent on subverting the constitution. Indeed it is common today to associate George III with tyranny, particularly in the United States. Perhaps the sobering effects of several centuries has muted this controversial king’s legacy to some degree, but a growing modern revisionist reassessment of George III’s legacy is not enough to overcome his…

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBORA) and the United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) share common constitutional DNA. Both are “parliamentary bills of rights” that eschew a judicial power to invalidate rights-infringing legislation. However, the two rights instruments historically have diverged in a couple of important ways regarding the form of post-enactment judicial rights review of legislation that they are taken to authorise. First, the HRA, s 4 confers on the courts an express power to issue a formal declaration that a parliamentary enactment that cannot be interpreted consistently with certain rights contained in the Convention is incompatible with that rights instrument. The NZBORA, by comparison, is almost completely silent as to the judicial remedies available in a case involving a breach of its rights guarantees. Second, the UK courts have adopted an approach to interpreting potentially Convention inconsistent legislation using the HRA, s…

Sometimes a hero is not a general who leads his troops into battle, or a surgeon who performs an impossible operation, sometimes it is just an ordinary woman who refuses to give up her seat in a bus.

Today 66 years ago Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the colored section,  to a white passenger, after the white section was filled.
Lets never forget heroes like Rosa Parks.

By refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus in 1955, black seamstress Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States. The leaders of the local black community organized a bus boycott that began the day Parks was convicted of violating the segregation laws. Led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The boycott lasted more than a year, during which…

Current press reports suggest that the Federal Government is contemplating a change to the provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 which allow religious schools to operate in accordance with their religious commitments, in the area of decisions about students. This is being proposed to allay fears that the recently introduced Religious Discrimination Bill will impact on LGBT students. (See here for my overview of the Bill.) Just to be clear, I think this is a terrible idea- the Australian Law Reform Commission already has a reference on this issue and they should be allowed to complete their work by taking into account all the issues. But I make a few comments on the proposal anyway.

The provision in question is s 38(3) of the SDA, which allows religious schools to make decisions in relation to students in accordance with their religious commitments, and for that not to amount to…

Not only was China complicit in seeing to it that COVID-19 became a global outbreak that specifically targeted the United States, the Daily Caller has published a report about China’s complicitness in manufacturing and producing another means that killing Americans and others abroad: Fentanyl.

While the Biden administration focuses on coronavirus, but says nothing about how China is encouraging the manufacturing and distribution of fentanyl that kills thousands of lives each year. Worst of all, according to the Daily Caller, the death count has shot up massively with opioid and fentanyl deaths up over a period of 14 years. This short Daily Caller video briefly describes how the drug makes it to the United States.

A few days ago, the United States Congress voted to censure Representative Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican after he posted and edited anime video to his social media accounts that depicted violence against Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and President Biden.  This along with metal detectors at entrances to the House and Senate, repeated threats of violence against members, heated rhetoric mostly from the Republican side of the aisle by the likes of Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Green and Colorado Representative Lauren Bogart, who exhibited her Islamophobia once again the other day, and of course the events of January 6^th have raised the level of partisanship and outright fear among Congressional members to levels not seen in over 150 years.  Many argue that today’s split in the body politic has no precedent, however if one consults Joanne B. Freeman’s THE FIELD OF BLOOD: VIOLENCE…

Over at Chris Trotter’s blog, Bowalley Road, he recently had a post on the problems that state housing provider Kāinga Ora (KO) is having with “unruly tenants”.

Specifically the problems they’re having with gang members terrorising their neighbours, often very aged neighbours, and the seemingly complete inability of KO to do anything about it. Chris claims that it’s a case of the Labour Minister, Poto Williams, being “entirely captured by her officials”.

No! It is the entirely logical outcome of a modern Left-wing approach to crime that sees criminals as merely a by-product of a bad society, who cannot and should not be punished further.

To that end I saw a comment there from one “Swordfish”, which Chris did not publish but advised to be taken to reporters. Being somewhat familiar with the commentator I tracked him down to his blog, Subzero Politics (which I don’t frequent), and…

Wolfgang Munchau is a favourite European political commentator. You have to love a guy who ran the argument that Germany and Britain should team up to run the European Union.

Naturally you’d like to know his views on the new German governing coalition, which has just published its 178-page policy agreement.

The most interesting thing about the coalition is that it brings together the enviro-statist Green party with the right-liberal Free Democrats, who, as Munchau says “can’t stand the sight of each other”.

Let’s meet Professor Garth Cooper, described on the University of Auckland website as one of New Zealand’s foremost biological scientists and biotechnology entrepreneurs.

He is professor of Biochemistry and Clinical Biochemistry at the School of Biological Sciences and the Department of Medicine at the University of Auckland, where he also leads the Proteomics and Biomedicine Research Group. He is a Principal Investigator in the Maurice Wilkins Centre of Research Excellence for Molecular Biodiscovery, a member of the Endocrine Society (USA).  He was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (London) in 2013

And – for now – he is a member of the Academy of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

But the society has subjected him and another prominent academic, Robert Nola, to disciplinary action which looks suspiciously like a witch hunt.

Nola is emeritus professor of the philosophy of science with his own impressive CV.